Standing on the porch in the morning light, Adam could hear the muted chunk of a log and clink of a stove lid. Maria was building up the fire. Soon he would smell coffee brewing and beans heating and it would be a morning like every other morning. Only it wasn’t.
For the first time since Blade left, the thought crossed Adam’s mind that he really should get word to Spud about what was happening at the ranch. Until now he hadn’t felt any sense of serious danger. After all, once the prospect of money presented itself, Blade seemed almost eager to disappear, leaving Maria behind. But last night’s visitors changed the odds. Adam couldn’t leave Maria and now more men knew Adam was at the ranch. It probably wouldn’t be long before the two riders from last night would know he was there with Maria. Alone. Adam didn’t want to bet on the outcome.
If only he knew the identity of those men. Why were they there? Why was Blade there with Maria in the first place? Where was this Hole? Why did they ride off down the trail rather than up? Adam knew the way up. He had come from there, cutting through Arroyo Hondo toward San Cristobal before angling over to the ranch. But he had never gone down the trail. Could the Hole be down there? It must be. Adam felt the back of his neck begin to tingle like a dog’s hackles rising to signal his own growing fear.
The aroma of fresh coffee brought Adam back to the morning before him. His horse and mule dozed in the corral. Two mourning doves in the woods sang their sad, comforting tune. Adam rolled his shoulders to relax. He had no answers and no plan for how to reach Spud, but for the moment he allowed himself to feel comforted. No motion or noise came from the trail, the sun continued to move through its arc in the sky, and the aroma of coffee reminded his stomach that it was time to eat.
After breakfast Spud hunched over his desk in the windowless office nestled among the small warren of rooms near the east entrance to Mabel’s house. He piled several poems together and made space for them to the left of his desk mat. He would take another look at them later. It was time to continue editing Mabel’s memoir. He had reached the section where she described building her house. Funny that we call this Mabel’s house, as though Tony had nothing to do with it. Tony, who designed and built it, gets no naming rights. Well, Tony didn’t actually do the physical work himself. He supervised a crew from the pueblo. But still, he created this home for Mabel, really a whole new world for her, for them, one in which they both felt safe.
Blue Sky and Rainbow
Spud remembered Tony stretched tall near the door to Mabel’s room, a paintbrush extending his reach as he added a small kneeling figure to the top of a broad arrow that covered the sky below. The arrow was rounded like a rainbow over the sky, its blue dotted with little puff clouds. The dark kneeling figure held a small arrow pointed down like a quill pen or a knife. Spud wondered if Tony meant for the kneeling brave to be creating a universe or protecting it. Maybe both. Tony often painted symbolic figures throughout the house. The week before, he had sketched two buffalo in the same hallway as the new sky, one red, the other earth-toned with a large black blanket circling its body and covering its hump. The red buffalo was hidden behind the earth-toned one, its features vague. The legs of both ended in hooves that hooked back. Spud guessed Tony meant the hooked hooves to suggest that the buffalo moved forward together. The earth-toned buffalo in the foreground also sported a penis. Spud decided Tony meant that to suggest they were a pair.
Buffalo
Tony and Mabel, such an odd couple. The oddest part was that they were married. They lived together for several years before marrying, so, Spud wondered, why marry? He couldn’t imagine. He knew that Mabel sent her previous husband packing in 1919 and arranged for some kind of divorce for Tony from his pueblo wife. But who proposed to whom? Most likely, Mabel simply told Tony to marry her. But maybe not. Maybe others told them to marry, even insisted they do. Hard to believe that Tony would have brought up the subject. Not the sort of thing that would have occurred to him. White man’s laws. Just as hard to believe that Mabel cared one way or the other. She had already had her fill of husbands, Spud smiled at the thought. And lovers, too, his smile broadened. Mabel believed in free love, that was a fact. And, from what Spud had seen, she exercised her belief on a regular basis. Though, he had to grant, not everyone succumbed to her charms. Lawrence resisted and certainly Spud had. Mabel was a generous and loyal friend, Spud long ago learned, and it was better to keep her that way.
But marriage to Tony? Spud let his chair settle onto all four legs. He had to acknowledge that he really didn’t understand all the fuss about marriage anyway, never had. Such an uncomfortable custom. Man as head, woman as helpmate. Not mate, helpmate. Not something Spud wanted to be. Marriage, so unequal. The kind of inequity that led some men to think they could do anything with women, even kill and behead them and leave them half buried in dirt. Spud tilted his chair back, his mind filled with three shallow graves. Those women had been helpless and cast aside.
Spud caught his breath and gripped his head with both hands. He so rarely experienced anger he didn’t quite know what to do. He felt his head was going to explode. He wanted to hang the men who did that. Not necessarily by the neck. Sudden death would be too swift, too easy. He wanted those killers to dangle. He wanted fear to seep into their bones. He wanted their pain to become excruciating. Then maybe death. Spud exhaled slowly, a long, measured breath. He settled his chair square on the floor beneath him. Those women deserve justice, atonement, a restoration of balance in the universe. But hanging by itself wouldn’t create balance, except as an eye for an eye. Only a world in which women were equal to men would do that. The suffragettes had convinced him, but now that women had the vote, what really had changed?
Even Mabel seemed to think women should be subservient to men — plenty of evidence of that in her memoirs — but surely she didn’t think she needed marriage to accomplish that. So why marry Tony? And if Tony hadn’t proposed, then the rumors might well be true. Maybe Mabel and Tony agreed to marry in order to prevent the scandal of their relationship from endangering passage of the Pueblo Lands Act. How romantic, Spud scoffed, but important to them all the same. John Collier and his Indian Defense Association had sponsored the bill to protect Taos Pueblo lands and water rights. Collier, with Tony’s and Mabel’s passionate help, fought to keep Indian lands from falling into the hands of the non-Indians who had settled on them and now claimed ownership.
Spud knew both sides of that argument all too well. Hal Bynner had joined the opposition, feeling more sympathy for the settlers than the Indians. Hal pressured Spud to join him, but Spud decided to remain neutral. He wasn’t married to Hal, after all, and chose not to do his bidding. Without Collier’s bill those lands would simply disappear into the hands of developers, men like Manby. Spud didn’t want that to happen and he didn’t want anything to interfere with his relationship with Mabel and Tony, either. He knew they would do whatever was necessary to keep those lands in Indian hands.
But marriage? Marriage was a big step for Mabel and Tony, even bigger if they did it as a concession to political forces. Or maybe he was looking at it backwards. Spud rearranged Mabel’s papers, placing the pages he had not yet edited squarely in the middle of his blotter and moving the rest to his right. Maybe for them it was simply one step toward passage of the Pueblo Lands Act. Spud selected a freshly sharpened Eberhart and tested its eraser.
Andrew Dasburg could set him straight on all those rumors about the marriage, Spud guessed. Andrew Dasburg and Ida Rauh had been present at their wedding, the only guests who were. They would know what actually happened. But he probably wouldn’t ask. Andrew and Ida weren’t about to get married, at least Ida wasn’t. She had been vocal about how marriage entrapped women. But there she was, standing up with Mabel and Tony. Well, Andrew was one of Mabel’s oldest friends and her staunchest supporter. He would do whatever she asked of him. Apparently Ida would, too.
Spud wasn’t about to pry into Mabel’s life beyond what she revealed in her memoirs. But he
liked to know things. He was curious. He enjoyed gossip for exactly that reason. And exactly for that reason, he also wanted to know everything there was to know about the three women who had been murdered. Violently murdered and their bodies mutilated. Spud placed his Eberhart to the left of the manuscript and picked up the top page. How awful that must have been. He couldn’t imagine.
It was well past nine and already reaching high into the eighties when Edith joined Andrew Dasburg and Ida Rauh for the drive to the pueblo. Ida handed her an umbrella to keep the sun off. It was going to be a hot day. Edith had prepared for the sun by wearing the wide-brimmed hat she used for riding, but who knows, by early afternoon they might get another monsoon rain. She climbed into the back seat of Andrew’s Ford and balanced the umbrella with her sketchpad on her knees.
Andrew laughed and said, “That umbrella won’t protect you from the sun any more than your hat and jodhpurs, but it might keep tourists from asking if you are one of their girl guides.”
Edith laughed along with Andrew. She and Willa did dress a little like the female tourist guides for pueblo tours. But she wouldn’t be mistaken for a tourist guide much longer. During breakfast Mabel had mentioned that when Fred Harvey took over Koshare Tours, his Detour guides might still be female but they had to trade their smart uniforms of jodhpurs, white shirts, and ties for Navajo skirts and jewelry. Well, Mabel declared, with all the dirt and dust at the pueblos, Fred Harvey’s laundry bills will soar. And they would, Edith chuckled, seeing in her mind the twenty or so Detour Cadillacs regularly lined up in front of La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. Fred Harvey would have to add a whole new wing to the hotel laundry.
The drive to the pueblo had become so familiar Edith barely needed to look up to know where they were. It was as though the previous summer had etched the road in her bones, a little swing to the right then a long straightaway, then another swing. Even the bumps were the same. It felt good to be going to the pueblo to sketch. And it felt good to be with Andrew and Ida again.
“How was your expedition with Tony and Spud?”
“Yes,” Ida broke in before Edith had a chance to answer. “We heard you bumped into that special agent guy and saw that horrible Manby person trotting down the mountain by himself. And you found a little silver cross near where those women’s bodies were dumped?”
“Well, whoever told you knew what they were talking about.” Edith leaned into a curve then placed the umbrella and sketch pad on the seat next to her. “It was an interesting excursion and we found both burial sites. But other than the cross I can’t say we succeeded in finding anything new. And I’m not sure the cross has anything to do with those bodies.”
“I suppose.” Ida sat silent a moment, then glanced back at Edith. “This probably doesn’t have anything to do with those bodies either, but Angelica has been telling me about rumors her Mexican friends heard. They say a lot of women in Mexico have disappeared, maybe killed or kidnapped. Nobody knows.”
“Angelica?”
“My housekeeper. You met her last summer.”
“Disappeared in Mexico?”
“In Mexico. Like I said, this probably doesn’t have anything to do with those women, but we heard they did look Mexican. Their clothes and all?”
Edith settled more deeply into her seat.
Andrew parked the Ford under a cottonwood tree near the Rio Pueblo, where shade and running water promised to keep it cool. The three artists spread out, choosing their spots according to what they wanted to sketch. Andrew strode to the top of a small rise where he could take in the whole façade of the building that housed most of the pueblo. Edith was familiar with the way his sketches turned into paintings with blended colors and softened squares suggesting rather than depicting the actual pueblo.
Ida, who preferred sculpture to painting, leaned against a low adobe wall close to where three women were grinding corn. Ida’s sketches would trace the shape of the women’s faces and the strong, strong hands that shoved their grinding stones up and down, up and down, crushing corn against the matates positioned tight against their kneeling limbs. Just the faces and hands, Edith guessed, nothing else. Her mind slipped back to the face and hands of the woman she and Willa found the previous summer. Mexican, yes. Not Navajo. Not pueblo Indian. Mexican. And, Edith remembered, her wrists and ankles were bruised as if she had been bound.
Edith put the memory aside. She would think about it later. She chose to sit on a flat boulder from where she could see close up the shadows and patches of sun as they picked out the angles and curves in a single adobe wall. Adobe bricks, made from the sand and clay underfoot and annually coated with mud, created walls that were never even. They undulated, swelling or falling away as the hand or tool spreading mud rose and fell following the bricks beneath. Soft and warm, the color of the earth around them, the muted shapes and hues of the walls responded to light and shade in slow motion, almost as if they were alive.
As he had the previous summer, Andrew loaned her a box of pastels. She would try juxtaposing their colors to catch the sense of life, the shape-shifting in the wall before her. It’s magic, Andrew said, when she asked him how he created the aura of motion in his pueblo paintings. Not all Cubists did that, but Andrew did. Focus on color, on shades of color and lines, he said, and the magic just happens. Edith placed the flat side of an earth-toned pastel against her sketchpad and with a firm hand drew it down. She wanted nothing less than magic. Takes practice, she reassured herself, and chose a deep blue for the first stroke of shadow.
IX
“THE SHERIFF is not here.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Agent Dan dropped the small silver cross on Emilio’s desk. “Ever see one like this?”
Emilio touched the cross with his index finger. He shook his head.
“Local made?”
Emilio shrugged.
“Know who sells crosses like this one?”
“Many places. Don’t know this one.”
“Could it be local? Pueblo? Mexican?”
His face expressionless, Emilio looked at Agent Dan.
“One edge is worn, maybe it’s been used to cut something?”
Emilio stared at the cross. His face remained expressionless.
“Right.” Agent Dan picked up the cross. “Where does the sheriff keep his evidence locked up?”
“Evidence?”
“That’s amazing, Nicolai!”
Willa’s raised eyebrows added force to her exclamation. Edith watched as Willa adjusted the sleeves on her peasant blouse and slipped off the stool Nicolai had placed so that she would be flooded with sunlight in his makeshift studio. Willa was so excited she hugged Edith. “I’m glad you came back in time to see this. It’s a triumph!” Ignoring Nicolai’s reticence, she hugged him, too.
Nicolai Fechin, Sketch of Willa Cather
Nicolai pulled away saying, “No, no. It’s you! You are the triumph! Look,” he extended his arm toward the charcoal sketch on his easel, “this is you. This is a woman who has lived fully and well. This is a writer thinking, a serious writer in command of her art, a powerful artist.” Nicolai paused, stepped back, and repeated, “This is you.”
“It’s perfect.”
Edith loved the sketch. Nicolai was right. He had caught Willa the artist. Not the one who would giggle and dangle her toes in a mountain stream, but the one who thought deeply, researched thoroughly, and honed her craft until it had become hers to use as she chose. This Willa, Nicolai’s Willa, brimmed with life. And she was powerful, almost overwhelmingly so. Palpably so. Edith stepped forward for a closer examination. Nicolai had included only Willa’s head and the upper portion of her body, but her energy flowed from the sketch as if the paper were charged with electricity.
“The peasant blouse is perfect,” Edith continued. “That flowing, deep-throated collar,” she pointed to the material near Willa’s throat. “Lovely. Just lovely.”
Nicolai had provided the peasant blouse. Genius, Edith thought. Willa loved posing
in costume. She always had. It was like acting, and Willa loved the theater. Loved everything theatrical. Edith guessed that’s why Willa had been drawn to Leon Bakst, the Russian painter and set designer for the Ballets Russes, for her first portrait. The Omaha Society of Fine Arts had insisted on a portrait after Willa won the Pulitzer Prize. They wanted to celebrate her success by hanging her portrait in the Omaha Public Library. They told Willa to pick the artist. Willa was visiting Isabelle and Jan Hambourg in Paris at the time, and Isabelle suggested Bakst.
When she returned to New York, Willa described to Edith the endless days she spent sitting for Bakst in his Paris studio. How his studio overflowed with rich colors and plush textures and how delightful he had been. But the final portrait proved to be a disaster. Despite all Bakst’s efforts and the modern cut of her dress, her seated body was out of proportion, her hand holding a book too large, and her eyes, eyes that stared disconcertingly forward, followed a viewer from every direction. And they were opaque, vacant, almost as empty of expression as the eyes of the woman whose body they found last summer. Edith shook her mind loose from that vision and returned to the image Bakst had painted of Willa. His Willa appeared sad, listless, and somehow stiff, as if she were a tired pear a little off-center in a still life.
How can a dress so stylish be made to look like such a limp sack, Willa had protested. She was embarrassed and the women of the art society disappointed, but they hung the portrait in the Omaha library and paid Bakst’s bill. The whole experience made Willa so uncomfortable Edith couldn’t resist teasing that Bakst made her look like one of the club ladies who ordered the portrait. That’s not funny, Willa said, and Edith promised never to mention the portrait again.
But now Willa was ecstatic. No question about it, Fechin had caught her essence. “Such a sense of life. Of emotion. And it’s me,” she exclaimed. “But how serious I look, how stern, almost imperious. Do I really look like that?”
Death Comes Page 10
